Meta

The State of the User

OmniWeb 5’s Workspaces reminded me of a feature I really liked while I was using GNOME and KDE extensively on Linux machines – saved environment states, often referred to as sessions.

Saving a snapshot of a user’s environment that is then opened when the user logs in again is a great way to preserve continuity. You don’t have to set login items to launch, you don’t have to remember what sites you were browsing, what documents you had open, and on a more general level, what the hell you were doing. With a well implemented session saving feature, the applications you had open and positioned return, the sites you were browsing reload, both of which serve to bring you back to whatever you were working on.

Fast User Switching under 10.3 (thanks for the feature, Microsoft) provides this for the most part, but it of course requires that the user be logged in and all of their applications be open, accompanied by the necessary RAM and/or swap space usage. All continuity is lost as soon as the user completely logs out or the computer is shut down.